Sr. Certified SharePoint/O365 Architect/SME, MCP (Freelance)

What’s new with O365 for October 2014

Courtesy O365 teamOctober featured updates pretty much across all Office 365 services. First was the launch of Office Sway, the first completely new Office experience in over a decade. Students and teachers can look forward to updates for OneNote, a new class notebook app, Office Mix and more. Office 365 small and midsize business customers have new subscription plan options, security and protection services released plans for tons of new innovation rolling out now and in the first half of 2015. And communication on Mac OS X got better with a new Outlook for Mac app, and an updated Lync for Mac. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s New: September 2014.Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates

Office Sway – A brand new app to the Office portfolio. Say hello to Sway! Sway is an entirely different way to express yourself and bring your ideas to life. When your ideas are born, you want to explore, visualize and share them—quickly and easily, wherever you happen to be, and on whatever device you have. You want your ideas to be understood. Sway helps you do just that. It’s a new way for you to create a beautiful, interactive, web-based expression of your ideas, from your phone or browser.

OneNote + Chegg Study – A new Clip It button, right next to any Q&A, saves all the answers into OneNote. From there, students can use OneNote to build their study guides, study with friends and take notes.

OneNote class notebooks -The app creates OneNote class notebook, which is organized into three areas: Student notebooks: Private notebooks that are shared between the teacher and each individual student. Teachers can access these notebooks at any time, but students cannot see each other’s notebooks; Content library: A place where teachers can handout course materials to students; Collaboration space: A space for anyone in the class to share, organize and collaborate.

PowerPoint Online spellcheck improvements – To help you deliver great, error-free presentations we added spell check to the PowerPoint Online editor. We previously utilized the browser spell check for PowerPoint Online, but we switched to the high quality Office spell checker. When you are editing text in PowerPoint Online, misspelled words are flagged with a red underline.

Office Mix updates – Three new features have been added based on customer feedback. First you can now record an Office Mix “Live” as you’re presenting. Second, we’ve improved Office Mix editing to make it easier for you to record yourself by enabling pause and resume so you can take breaks while recording. Third, we added search to the Office Mix Gallery to help you find mixes in an ever-growing gallery of community content.

Office Online app launcher – We’re starting to roll out the new app launcher for our consumer services—namely Office Online, Outlook.com and OneDrive. Outlook.com users have been switching apps this way for quite some time, so today’s change represents a small visual change. However, the exciting news is that now launching apps is the same whether you’re working or tending to your personal life.

OneNote for OS X and iOS updates – Now you can add files from your favorite cloud storage service to OneNote on your iPhone or iPad. We added support for adding, changing and removing section passwords from any Apple device. On iPhone, you can now rearrange your pages. In OneNote for Mac you can now open and sync notebooks stored on SharePoint Server.

One-Time Passcode for Office 365 Message Encryption – Previously, when you received a message encrypted with Office 365 Message Encryption, you could view the encrypted message only by using a Microsoft account. Now, with the addition of the One-Time Passcode capability, you can view an encrypted message you receive without having to sign in with a Microsoft account. If you have a Microsoft account, you now have the option to view an encrypted message by selecting one-time passcode instead of signing in with your account.

Share OneDrive for Business files with Outlook Web App – Two new ways help you share files with OWA. First, when you send an email in OWA, you can easily insert a link to a file on your OneDrive for Business cloud drive instead of attaching the file itself. Second, when you send an attachment from your computer or device you can now automatically upload the file to your OneDrive for Business cloud drive and share the file as a link to that location.

PowerPoint Online spellcheck improvements – To help you deliver great, error-free presentations we added spell check to the PowerPoint Online editor. We previously utilized the browser spell check for PowerPoint Online, but we switched to the high quality Office spell checker. When you are editing text in PowerPoint Online, misspelled words are flagged with a red underline.

Improving Outlook Web App options and settings – Going forward, when you click an item in the drop-down menu or the Options link, under the gear icon, you’re taken to a new interface, where all the options and settings are now available in a single, streamlined, navigation tree on the left

Office 365 app launcher – The app launcher offers a customizable single point of access to the applications you use daily. Simply click the top left app launcher icon to open the app launcher—from there you can launch into creating documents, presentations or check Yammer for the latest updates from colleagues. The app launcher enables you to put your important tools where you want them—using the pin and un-pin functionality.

Lync Online client devices report – A new Lync Online client devices report, which tells you how many users in your organization have used one specific type of device to take part in peer-to-peer or conference in a specified month. The metrics in this report are available through PowerShell Cmdlet: Get-CsClientDeviceReport, RESTFul WebService API: CsClientDeviceMonthly as well as a graphical report in Office 365 admin center for client devices.

Project online performance improvements – We have started to roll out performance enhancements to Project Online tenants worldwide, a few common things that will feel much snappier as a result of these investments are: navigating to a specific project from Project Center, interacting with projects on the web, creating and publishing a project, and submitting timesheets. We are also providing new levers to Project Online administrators to further enhance the value for their organizations. These are designed to improve performance when creating projects, working with Project Detail Pages and publishing projects including the option to turn off the creation of Enterprise Project sites and the option to turn off the Task List Sync. We also successfully addressed a few key customer requirements around improved scale by increasing Projects limit per PWA instance to 5,000.

Office 365 help US government customers with IRS 1075 – Office 365 Government now supports customer compliance with IRS 1075, which provides guidance to ensure that the policies, practices, controls and safeguards employed by recipient agencies adequately protect the confidentiality of Federal Tax Information (FTI) and related financial data. IRS 1075 also prioritizes security aspects that include data center parameters such as employee activity, data center contractors, limited entry and IRS safeguard reviews.

Smarter spreadsheet search in Office 365 – You can now gain better visibility into your spreadsheets in Office 365. We integrated the spreadsheet risk assessment concepts directly into the enterprise search capability that’s already crawling your document libraries and cataloging your spreadsheets. This means that you can quickly search for spreadsheets based on properties that help you understand their complexity and business impact.

Lync for Mac update – In this update we’ve added Media Resiliency and Conversation History, as well as additional support for Apple OS X Yosemite.

SSL 3.0 Vulnerability – Starting on December 1, 2014, Office 365 will begin disabling support for SSL 3.0. This means that from December 1, 2014, all client/browser combinations will need to utilize TLS 1.0 or higher to connect to Office 365 services without issues. This may require certain client/browser combinations to be updated.

OneNote for OS X and iOS updates – Now you can add files from your favorite cloud storage service to OneNote on your iPhone or iPad. We added support for adding, changing and removing section passwords from any Apple device. On iPhone, you can now rearrange your pages. In OneNote for Mac you can now open and sync notebooks stored on SharePoint Server.

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Published by jimehr

I am a 20 year member of the Microsoft Community and the former founder of "Compass Computer Group", an award winning Microsoft Managed Partner and one of Microsoft's first SharePoint Partners. Over a period of 13 years, Compass successfully delivered over $50 million in custom solutions for clients such as Warner Bros., Fidelity National, The Salvation Army, CAA, Universal Studios, Westwood Insurance, Chicago Title, Paramount, Paul Hastings Janofsky and Walker, The City of Hope, UCLA, and Microsoft Consulting Services.
As Managing Partner and Senior SharePoint Architect at SharePoint Pros, I focus on the design, development, and deployment of SharePoint solutions. I am also a frequent speaker at Microsoft events and SharePoint conferences.
Specialties
- SharePoint consulting
- SharePoint life-cycle management
- SharePoint requirements gathering
- SharePoint roadmap development
- SharePoint best practices
- SharePoint adoption
- SharePoint governance
- SharePoint mentoring and support
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